I was listening to a podcast this week which featured Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed’s tech division who had just written a pretty dark piece featuring a term that might be new to many of us: ‘’reality apathy”. The idea is that the internet is moving beyond “fake news” to a place in which already Artificial Intelligence of certain tech is to the point that someone can edit video of anyone saying or doing anything with a level of realness that can easily fool our senses. The fear is that we will be so continually “Beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up.” (https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news?) That as a society we will just simply stop investigating, stop thinking, stop reading, stop searching for truth. What happens when everything is fake news?
While it can be easy to get cynical about this, there is an opportunity here. As Christians we believe in things that we are not subject to modern manipulation. Where the modern news cycle deals in days, even hours, we deal in centuries. I believe that there is a bedrock of truthfulness about the Christian faith that can be easily investigated, and thus provide an anchor post of truth in this world of fake news. Perhaps now more than ever we need to train ourselves to think soberly and critically about the historical evidence for the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. That’s what I hope to do in this series. Todays exploration: Did Jesus Really Live?